I’ve had the privilege of trying out a number of these new strategies and experiments this year, learning tons about the best way to share on social media.

I’d love to share with you what I’ve learned!

Keep reading for my list of the biggest social media lessons from the past 12 months. And feel free to add any further thoughts or learnings of yours into the comments!

1. How to Get Your Content Seen in the Facebook News Feed

Facebook has built a hugely sophisticated algorithm to help decide which of the thousands of possible stories from your friends and favorite pages will show up in your feed. One side effect of the algorithm is that people who like your page might never see your content.

3. How to Find the Best Time to Post to Social Media

By many measures, the most logical time to post is when the highest number of your followers and fans are online. We’ve used some neat tools like Followerwonk and Facebook Insights to find these ideal times and implement them into our Buffer schedule.

#2. Post when no one else is posting.

On the flip side, we’ve noticed that some of our best posting times seem to be in non-peak hours—late at night or on the weekends when the volume of posts on a social network is typically lower.

We also compiled a huge list of 189 words that convert, featuring curated samples of some of advertising’s favorite action words. Here are David Ogilvy’s 20 favorite influential words:

Suddenly

Now

Announcing

Introducing

Improvement

Amazing

Sensational

Remarkable

Revolutionary

Startling

Miracle

Magic

Offer

Quick

Easy

Wanted

Challenge

Compare

Bargain

Hurry

6. One of Twitter’s Best (and Free!) Advertising Tools: Twitter Cards

Earlier this year, Courtney did an incredible amount of research into Twitter cards, finding out how to set up this free resource and how to implement it in a variety of different ways for your Twitter profile.

Here are the 10 different Twitter cards options at your disposal:

Summary card

Large photo summary card

Product card

Player card

Audio card

Photo card

Gallery card

App card

Lead generation card

Website card (see sample below)

A couple of the most valuable ones for us have been the summary cards, which provide additional information for our blogposts, and the lead generation cards, which we have used to grow our email list and share our ebooks.

7. How to Create a Facebook Link That Others Will Clamor Over

Facebook’s Open Graph gives us marketers an amazing suite of options to control the way that our articles look when they’re shared to Facebook (other networks like Google+ use these tags, too). When you share a link to Facebook, the author of the link has control over just about everything:

8. Facebook Advertising: Necessary or Not?

As Facebook reach has declined, many marketers have turned to Facebook advertising. You can get a lot of value out of a small budget. Moz found that $1 per day can grow you audience by thousands. Others have seen similar results.

If you just spend $1 per day on Facebook ads, you will get in front of 4,000 people that wouldn’t have seen you otherwise. If you are doing that and your competitors aren’t, you win the awareness game in your niche.

And still others mention ads with a word of warning: Some of the traffic that you receive may lack the quality of organic reach, as explained in this video:

This is an area we’re keen to explore further in the coming months, so stay tuned. Have you had an experience with Facebook advertising? What did you learn?

9. How to Find Your Audience on Social Networks

Ello, Snapchat, Path, and others. New social networks are entering the fray every year, and your audience might be diverting some of its time and energy into new places.

Take Product Hunt, for instance. The site for submitting and finding new online products has built a large community very quickly. We’ve noticed it might be a place that potential a Buffer audience meets, so we’ve sought to engage the community by joining as Buffer creators, submitting our new products and the products of others, and joining into conversations.

First time commenting but have been a long time reader, anytime I come here I end up going into an evening of social bookmarking, rss subscribing, web page to pdf for later and some more, from your posts lol. I always come away with new and interesting angles to beef up the index of the brain for future reference, all the best for 2015

Hi there Gerry! Thank you so much for the comment! It’s awesome to hear that the blogposts have been helpful for you. 🙂 And I love your tip about “web page to pdf for later”! I’ll have to remember that one!

Robin Pierman

Wonderful Summary. I’m going to have to bookmark this one for future reference.

I am social Media marketer and reading such brilliant articles for growth of my career is what I was looking for. Thank you for letting us know ,how the social stuff works !! Thank you 🙂 >> http://www.xduce.in

Thanks for the 2014 review Kevan. I feel like I have learned more in 2014 in our industry than in the 3 years before combined. It is a good feeling to have confidence going into presentations, knowing that I am ahead of the pack. Have a happy New Year and may 2015 be a fun and successful year for you! 🙂

Great post! Love using Buffer for my work and the insights, like this, to have better direction!

Jaime Izaks

Thanks for the post, Kevan. Since my franchise PR firm works with many industries, we’ve noticed that engagement on social media always depedns on the industry and there is no standard “good day/time” to post. B2B tends to be during the week, mornings while B2C tend to be after work and on weekends.

Hi, Kevan! I love these curation-type posts as I always learn so much. It’s like having a giant how-to book at my fingertips and all I have to do is reap the benefits of all your research. A new one for me is the Twitter cards. I’ll have to try that. Thanks so much!
Question: Do you have any stats on social media usage by middle-aged women, the prime audience for historical fiction (which I write)? Or specific best ways to reach this audience?

Sharon

Yes, Elaine, that’s a cogent question and one whose answer would help me? I write erotic romance novels, and I don’t know how to reach this audience.

Guest

I never assume when I tweet that anyone is reading it at the time it’s posted. I get great response when I tweet a few links to my blog over a few hours and then follow 25-30 like-minded people. It seems people in my circles will check out a profile page and the last few tweets before following back.

Craig W. Turner

I never assume when I tweet that anyone is reading it at the time it’s posted. I get great response when I tweet a few links to my blog over a few hours and then follow 25-30 like-minded people. It seems people in my circles will check out a profile page and the last few tweets before following back.

Great question, Anthony! I believe this advice came about because at a max of 100 characters, you can still leave room for someone to add a thought or two to the tweet if they decide to retweet. My gut is that 100 characters plus a hyperlink might be a bit too long, 71 plus a hyperlink should be just great!

Firstly, Kudos to you for writing such an informative and a great article. I am glad that I have come across this and it’s just superb!
The one who has been dealing with Social Media marketing will surely find this article quite useful as it includes many effective tips. What I would like to suggest others regarding content updates on Facebook is to avoid promotional posts as per Facebook’s latest updates in their news-feed. Also, try creating content that contains a mixture of attention grabbing quotes,festival posts, trivias & facts. You may find this link helpful for your Facebook Marketing: http://bit.ly/1D0VEuV

AWESOME POST!! THANK YOU BUFFER!! Seriously you guys have better social media tips than anyone I know!

Akash Dave

Hello Everyone,

Today I am writing this post to
introduce one cool application named INSTAMAPIA! Friends as we all knows,
nowadays Instagram is becoming the most popular social media which is basically
used for its photo and video sharing feature. But does Instagram allow users
some Geo search, sharing and saving Instagram images??

The answer of my question is a
big no..! The Instagram does not allow sharing and saving images. So if one
wants to share or save any ultra-cool image of INSTAGRAM then what should he do
?

Friends, INSTAMAPIA provides
wide platforms to the PHOTOGRAPHERS as well, they can explore their photography
with the world by sharing them on map and get more likes and followers by
showing their photography skills.

You can also come to know about
how different festivals are being celebrated in different area of world and how
people are celebrating it. Here is one beautiful image of kites I got from
Instagram while searching for #kitefestivalhashtag using Instamapia.

There are many other exciting
features of this app, which will change your way of using INSTAGRAM ! So
friends now its your chance to gram instamapia and start exploring the world
through your device.. You can grab your app from below:

I have noticed this year already by using Commun.it and Buffer my followers have increased and I have more engagement onTwitter and LI. FB however has really fallen by the wayside in my book. I beleive the majority of the users on FB are marketers who were using it to do a lot of promotion, but now that FB has made it so difficult, a lot of those people are falling away. I know myself, for instance, has really seen the engagement and traffic on Twitter and thus Twitter has beceom my new best friend.

Just today, I found out what SOV means. Researching this post, in fact, was the first time I discovered the definition (SOV = “Share of Voice,” by the way!). I had seen it on social media articles and updates and never knew what it meant. Do you have similar acronyms or abbreviations you’ve wondered about? Our […]